Law enforcement officer uses a dog to search parked cars located in part of the Central Texas Marketplace Tuesday, May 19, 2015, in Waco, Texas. A deadly weekend shootout involving rival motorcycle gangs apparently began with a parking dispute and someone running over a gang member's foot, police said Tuesday. One man was injured when a vehicle struck his foot. That caused a dispute that continued inside the restaurant, where fighting and then shooting began, before spilling back outside, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said. The shootout left nine people dead injured 18 wounded. (Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune-Herald via AP) less

Law enforcement officer uses a dog to search parked cars located in part of the Central Texas Marketplace Tuesday, May 19, 2015, in Waco, Texas. A deadly weekend shootout involving rival motorcycle gangs ... more

Photo: Rod Aydelotte, Associated Press

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Law enforcement officers take a break from an investigation near their command post near Twin Peaks restaurant Tuesday, May 19, 2015, in Waco, Texas. A deadly weekend shootout involving rival motorcycle gangs apparently began with a parking dispute and someone running over a gang member's foot, police said Tuesday. One man was injured when a vehicle struck his foot. That caused a dispute that continued inside the restaurant, where fighting and then shooting began, before spilling back outside, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said. The shootout left nine people dead injured 18 wounded. (Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune-Herald via AP)

Law enforcement officers take a break from an investigation near their command post near Twin Peaks restaurant Tuesday, May 19, 2015, in Waco, Texas. A deadly weekend shootout involving rival motorcycle gangs

Law enforcement continue to investigate the motorcycle gang related shooting at the Twin Peaks restaurant, Monday, May 18, 2015, in Waco, Texas, where 9 were killed Sunday and over a dozen injured. Waco police on Monday announced the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission closed Twin Peaks for a week amid safety concerns. (AP Photo, Jerry Larson) less

Law enforcement continue to investigate the motorcycle gang related shooting at the Twin Peaks restaurant, Monday, May 18, 2015, in Waco, Texas, where 9 were killed Sunday and over a dozen injured. Waco police ... more

Photo: Jerry Larson, Associated Press

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A police officer recovers a shotgun while sweeping through the parking lot of a Twin Peaks restaurant Tuesday, May, 19, 2015, in Waco, Texas. A deadly weekend shootout involving rival motorcycle gangs at the restaurant apparently began with a parking dispute and someone running over a gang member's foot, police said Tuesday. (Jerry Larson/Waco Tribune-Herald via AP)

A police officer recovers a shotgun while sweeping through the parking lot of a Twin Peaks restaurant Tuesday, May, 19, 2015, in Waco, Texas. A deadly weekend shootout involving rival motorcycle gangs at the

Why Waco? Biker brawl another blow to central Texas city with colorful history

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WACO - "Big Sandy," they called him. Tall and gaunt with a long reddish-colored beard and hair, McLennan County Judge George Bruce Gerald was a Mississippian who had brought his family to Waco after the Civil War. He had fought at Manassas under Robert E. Lee, was twice wounded and was elected county judge on his promise to clean out the town's numerous gambling dens. When one of the establishments ignored his order to close, he broke down the door of the place, smashed all the fixtures and threw the gambling paraphernalia out an upstairs window.

If there's one man who embodies the bubbling cauldron of violence, moral rectitude and religious fervor that was early Waco, it's Big Sandy, whose outsized exploits were matched only by his reputation for honesty and rectitude.

Gerald comes to mind, because I was back home yet again this week in the wake of the Twin Peaks outrage. The bodies and the weapons and the bikes had been cleared away by the time I got to town on Wednesday, but the vexing question remained: "Why Waco?" I thought it might be useful to approach the lingering mystery in a round-about way, with Gerald.

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Native Texan

He was the quintessential Scots-Irish settler who brought to Texas the combative, intensely individualistic, often violent traits that originated in the "borderlands" between Scotland and England, took root in Appalachia and then spread into Texas and other Southern states. Whether those characteristics settled into Waco's psyche, so to speak, is hard to say, although with a fellow like Gerald around it's easy to see why this small Central Texas city has been both "Athens on the Brazos" and "Six-Shooter Junction" over the years.

Canings and a duel

This was Gerald: When a streetcar conductor failed to stop and pick up his wife Omega, he grabbed the heavy cane he always carried and ran several blocks in pursuit of the streetcar. Although he couldn't use his left arm because his crippled and epileptic son Erin had accidentally shot him a few years earlier, he beat the conductor severely.

This too was Gerald: A founder and vestry member of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, he once caned the rector during an argument over some abstruse theological issue. He also disinherited his daughter, Florence, after she pursued her dream and became a nationally acclaimed actress.

In 1897, the 61-year-old Gerald got into a dispute with the editor of the Waco Times-Herald over a letter to the editor the judge submitted. Gerald challenged the editor, Jim Harris, to a duel. The next day the judge was walking out the front door of his house, headed downtown, when Omega noticed that a suspender button at the back of his pants was missing. All she could find was a metal button from his old Confederate Army coat. Although the button was too large, she hastily sewed it on and fastened his suspender strap.

As Gerald tied his horse to a downtown hitching post and began walking along the crowded street toward the Old Corner Drug, editor Harris stepped out of his office and began firing. A bullet shattered Gerald's left arm (which he subsequently lost), but he was able to draw his pistol and return fire, walking straight toward his assailant as he pulled the trigger on his six-shooter.

Harris's brother, William A. Harris, appeared and shot Gerald in the back, the bullet ricocheting off the metal button his wife had attached earlier. A police officer arrived and tried to disarm William, but Gerald reached over the two struggling men and killed his assailant. James Harris died soon afterward. Arrested and charged with murder, Gerald was acquitted and subsequently won re-election as county judge.

Perhaps other Texas towns have had their terrible-tempered Judge Geralds, and yet the occasional spasms of violence in Waco didn't end with the judge's peaceful demise. In 1898, his best friend, William Cowper Brann, the caustic, brilliant editor of The Iconoclast, was shot in the back - "right where the galluses cross" - on a downtown street. Brann, who shot and killed his assailant on the spot, died the next day.

On a May day in 1916, several thousand men, women and children gathered in City Hall square and watched a Waco rabble beat, castrate, burn and ultimately hang 16-year-old Jesse Washington, an African-American youth who had been convicted earlier in the day of raping and murdering a white farm woman for whom he and his parents worked. When a devastating tornado hit Waco nearly 40 years later, African-American Wacoans suggested that the storm followed the path of the youth's torturers when they attached his burned and broken body to a car and dragged it through city streets. Civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois labeled the lynching "the Waco horror."

Many Texas towns and cities are burdened with the legacy of lynching horrors - Wacoans were guilty of several - but only Waco has Branch Davidian. The weeks-long siege and deadly conflagration took place a dozen miles northeast of the city, near the tiny community of Elk, but it's Waco that's associated with the tragedy.

Wacoans are painfully aware of the Branch Davidian taint and the damage, however unfair, that it's done to their city's reputation. More than 20 years on, they hoped the "Wacko" reputation had faded, replaced in the public mind with signs of progress and prosperity: a gleaming new riverfront football stadium for the Baylor Bears, a revived downtown and a vibrant economy, not to mention the popular Waco-based "Fixer Upper" show on HGTV.

Things just happen

And now this - a biker-gang shoot-out in a shopping plaza that also represents the new Waco. My daughter, who's lived in England for many years, mentioned to an acquaintance a couple of days ago that she grew up in Texas. The man responded with, "Ah, Waco!"

Most of the hundreds of bikers who gathered here last Sunday were from elsewhere, police say, but still the question lingers: Why Waco?

I think I would have a hard time proving that violence and lawlessness are engrained in the city psyche, so what is it? Mere coincidence? The city's central location on IH-35? Or maybe, as Waco Convention Center Director Liz Taylor suggests, things just happen.

I met Taylor during the Branch Davidian siege, when it was her task to convince the world that Waco wasn't what it appeared to be. "I have learned to take things in stride," she told me this week. "It is all part of a growing community."

And, as Taylor suggests, things change. As I pulled into a shopping-center parking lot near the now-shuttered Twin Peaks, I got to wondering how old Judge Gerald would have dealt with a gang of armed biker thugs descending like a plague of locusts on his hometown. Wacoan that he was, I'm guessing he would have burst through the door, guns blazing, and shot them down himself.